Career Services is making some major changes during the intercession. They are in the process of putting career placement offices with each of UNF’s colleges.
The central Career Services office will not be moving, but their work will be done primarily with students who are undecided.
“The idea is to create career centers in each of the colleges, but you don’t suddenly just have a career center,” Rick Roberts, director of Career Services, continued. “The central office will continue to support these new centers by scheduling appointments, managing job fairs, scheduling on-campus recruiting events, and things like that.”
These changes are being made as an attempt to increase student employment rates and post-graduate salaries. The idea is that students will be able to have more direct access to opportunities in their field under this new career advising set up.
Roberts said a lot of the discussions regarding these changes directed back to the Coggin Career Management Center, which is a career advising center tailored to the Business College.
“About 10 years ago, they pulled away from Career Services and it enabled them to really focus on their students, develop programs for them, focus on the employers for that college and develop programming for that,” Roberts said.
The university thought that was a successful model and decided to do the same with the other colleges.
Fifteen staff members from Career Services are being redistributed amongst these new offices, said Roberts. These advisors will move from Student Affairs to Academic Affairs, meaning they now report to the dean of their respective colleges rather than to Roberts.
Madelyn Frazier, a junior studying social work, said she visited Career Services after getting rejected by the nursing program and they were really helpful with assessing her interests and evaluating her options.
“If advising is personalized for the colleges, then their advice is going to be geared towards jobs in that field, which is great if you know what you think you want to do,” Frazier said, “but as someone who’s changed majors, it was nice to have career advisors outside of the colleges.”
Ryan Gallagher, sports management sophomore, said he thinks this may create more work for students wanting to meet with career advisors, because they then have to figure out which advisor goes with their college and where to meet them instead of just visiting the main office.
This transition was set to go into effect August 1, but according to Roberts, is still a work in progress. Students wishing to meet with career advisors can still set up appointments by calling the central Career Services office at (904) 620-2955.
—
For more information or news tips, or if you see an error in this story or have any compliments or concerns, contact editor@unfspinnaker.com.
